Short Takes

Who Are These People?

The average person has every reason to be suspicious of those who appear waving
flags or proclaiming themselves "revolutionaries". This applies to
socialists and communists preaching literal revolution as well as to management
consultants, talk-radio hosts, and dot-com executives preaching metaphorical
revolution. Few groups of people have inflicted more misery on the world than
those who eagerly take on the job of overturning the order of other people's
lives.

So if we're talking about a fundamental change in life today, we had better have
a damn good reason. Of course today, you can look out of just about any window and
see quite a few good reasons. Your falling bank balance, the homeless wandering the
streets and the firestorms of war ready to engulf the world are only the most obvious ones.

If talking about revolution seems ridiculous today, talking about anything else
seems even more ridiculous. We do not aim to put change on the agenda for the
heck of it _ rather, the mad dash of today's society guarantees change. The
question is will this made dash end at a point of sanity, humanity and community, or
not. We go into this at length in the lead article of this issue.

Here we want to say a few things about those other folks talking
about change. Against Sleep And Nightmare magazine has been published for
about ten years, off and on. We've aimed to show how the system works without using
"isms" or ideology. Certainly, Marxists,
anarchists and others have influenced us. But if we
do anything worthwhile, it will involve breaking out of any specialty, whether
sociology, psychology or "Marxology". Rather
than imagining that we, ourselve will construct a new world, we imagine our actions will
inspire others to act for themselves.

We use the term "the left" to
describe those folks who take themselves as the
specialists and the managers of social change. This varies from the hacks of the
democratic party to the hacks of the various
"communist" parties and a wide variety of folks
labeling themselves anarchists _ though not everyone under the loose label "anarchist".

Anarchism is one rather simple "ism"
that has somehow recreated itself after being virtually dead for sixty years.
Anarchist magazines run from the neo-social
workers of "Onward! Magazine" to inchoate
nihilists, with a few more interesting things in-between. Why are they worth
criticizing now? One reason is that they have some
involvement in the class struggle. Another reason is that they have an open enough
framework some could accept average people taking power for themselves without
ideology. We can see "anarchistic" rebellions
today in Argentina or Algeria with virtually no
self-described anarchists involved. The contrast of anarchy versus anarchism has a grain
of truth to it. Still, some of the self-described anarchists can "get" that these
spontaneous revolution are a model for the
dispossessed taking back our world. A final reason
for dialogue is that there is a certain amount of space in the anarchist movement.
Anarchists don't always try to stop us from speaking
in the way that the Stalinists of A.N.S.W.E.R. systematically attempt to muzzle the
peace movement.
Red Hughes

September 11th and Anti-Imperialism

There is a trace of ambiguity about September 11th in some of the anarchist
magazines, and you hear it in loose talk. We will not name the publications
concerned, but you can find arguments along these lines: though thousands of
workers died, there were a few stockbrokers jumping out of windows as well!
When the Allies destroyed the city of Dresden in 1945, there were no doubt Nazi
officials there as well as thousands of residents and refugees, but this doesn't
make the bombing any less of a war crime. The World Trade Center consisted of
a pair of vertical factories peopled by workers in cubicles. Whoever was responsible
for September 11th, whether it was al-Qaeda, the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Israel or
some combination of them all, it was another crime against the working class
committed by the capitalist class.

The reason for this ambiguity is liberal white guilt. Here is an example:
American antifascists encourage `self-criticism
(challenging our own skin privilege)' (cited in `Little Beirut', issue one). A similar
mental anguish inspires some of the left in
Britain. On the first anniversary of September
11th, Islamic extremists held a meeting in London to celebrate. The right-wing British
National Party came out to protest. The police kept the two sides separate, so there was
no danger of any violence, but the extreme left turned up to oppose, not both sides, but
only the BNP _ not racists, but WHITE racists. We recommend Jim Goad's polemic
against anti-white racism, `The Redneck Manifesto'.

The most coherent variant of anti-imperialist guilt can be found, not in the
scribblings of anarchists, but in the works of
Lenin. Writing around the time of World War One, Lenin argued that the workers of
Western countries benefit from the worse
conditions of workers in the South. This error
arose from allowing morality to creep into economics. Americans don't benefit from
competition from workers in Vietnam making shoes for $42 a month.
Michel Chossudovsky analyzes the position in the productive process of Bangladeshi and
US workers in the clothing industry. In his typical example, a Bangladeshi worker
gets 1.7% of the price of what he produces, and an American sales assistant a
whopping 3.4% of the price of what he sells. There
is "no relationship of `unequal exchange' between factory workers in Bangladesh
and retail personnel in the US".

We are against morality because it maintain the law of value. It seeks to
exchange one act of exploitation for another.
Rather seeking to equalize misery, we seek a collective empowerment that ends
exploitation entirely. While we seek to combat the
racism and inequality of this society, we do not believe that being exploited is a
privilege for any member of the working class.

White guilt does nothing for the dispossessed. Worse, it leads to support for
those who exploit them. The Vietnamese national liberation movement, a darling of sixties
liberals, started its career by suppressing workers' strikes in Saigon, in 1945, while
the country was still occupied by France. The government created by this movement
now viciously represses workers who fight their exploitation by Nike and other
companies. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela's
supporters tortured and murdered their opponents, including a fourteen-year-old, with
impunity, partly because they were idolized by
liberals around the world. We don't hear much about South Africa these days. This is
because the workers are now struggling against evictions, layoffs and murder dished out
by a black government. When they were fighting the white apartheid regime, they
were always in the news. There should be no room for white guilt or anti-imperialism in
an analysis of September 11th. Frank Ophelia

The Globalization of Poverty, Michel Chossudovsky,
Zed Books, 1997

The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad, Simon &
Schuster, 1997

Remember Halabja!

Feb 2003

"Schwarzkopf in particular draws fire for approving a cease-fire that permitted
the Iraqi military to fly helicopters after the
war. Soon afterward, Iraqi helicopter gunships were used to put down revolts
against Hussein in the Shiite south and the
Kurdish north of Iraq. Only later were `no-fly
zones' established to help protect those minority populations"
Washington Post, Jan 27 2003.

The above quote is a classic example of how the ruling class's media bury even
the clearest expressions of conflict between, and solidarity within, classes. In the
first place, allowing Saddam Hussein to use helicopter gunships to suppress
the uprisings of 1991 was an example of solidarity within the ruling class. The
US had just waged war on Saddam's government _ but when the working
class threatened this government, the US supported it. Differences within
the ruling class are set aside when the more important differences
between them and the proletariat are expressed. In the second place,
the uprisings were not `Shiite' or `Kurdish'. The working class of
Iraq is concentrated around the oil fields of the North, in Kurdistan, and
the South, around Basra. The northern Kurdish proletariat
explicitly expressed solidarity with the rest of the Iraqi proletariat:
"We will celebrate our New Year with the Arabs in
Baghdad!". Most of the southern Iraqi workers are
not `Shiites'. The Basra region is one of the most secular in the Middle
East. Finally, the `no-fly zones' were established after the proletariat
had been crushed, to protect the warlords of Kurdistan, and enable them
to keep `their' proles contained.

It is a measure of modern media saturation that a word like
proletariat might seem like a hoary relic from
a bygone day. In fact, it is a very useful term. Historically,
"the proletariat" has meant the tendency
of working and impoverished people to unite as a group to serve their
interests. If we say "bush is attacking the proletariat", We aren't implying that the
ruling class secretly talks about things in these terms. Bush or Rumsfeld would express
their fear of dispossessed seizing power using vague terms like "until the current
unrest subsides, Saddam's regime is critical for maintaining order, civil society and
commerce." But this bland language of
"public policy" still comes down to the rulers
expressing their interests. It is in the interests of the rulers to make the collective
interests of the poor unclear. It is in our interests
to use terms which make them clear.

Directly after Schwarzkopf and Powell had assisted Saddam in massacring the
rebellion, revolutionaries in Britain made contact with their counterparts in
Kurdistan and produced a leaflet `Ten Days That Shook
Iraq' which was translated into several languages and widely distributed.
The original is still available by writing to
BM CAT, London WC1N 3XX, England. This is a summary of the flyer.

The Gulf War of 1991 was ended by the mutiny of the Iraqi army. So
comprehensive was the mutiny that not one Allied
soldier was killed. The armed workers sparked off uprisings in Southern Iraq and in
the Kurdish area of the north. Only the central region around Baghdad remained firmly
in the hands of Iraqi state. The uprising was neither religious nor nationalist. The
politics of the participants ranged from
traditional Communist Party to real revolutionary
ideas like forming workers' councils. A revolutionary group,
"Communist Perspective", played a major role in
the uprising. Naturally, revolutionaries in Iraq are armed to the teeth. They do not
have discussions about the legitimacy of violence.

There was little support for the Kurdish nationalists in the north. We have all
heard of the Halabja massacre of 1988, when Saddam `gassed his own people',
though we don't usually hear that the USA supported him materially and
politically. Neither do we hear that, far from being a massacre of
Kurdish nationalist insurgents, the massacre was assisted by the Kurdish
parties, who prevented people from leaving Halabja and then went on to
pillage from and rape some of the survivors.

Although, as we have said, the Iraqi workers refused to fight,
this didn't stop the Allies from attacking them. The horrific pictures of
the dead Iraqis on the road to Basra are not pictures of the massacre of
a retreating army, but of a
mutinying one. Conversely, the only part of
the Iraqi army still loyal to Saddam, the Republican Guard, was
left untouched so it could also massacre the mutineers.

The reason the allies didn't `finish the job' by
removing Saddam in 1991 was that they needed him to finish a
more important job _ crushing the insurgent proletariat. Assisted
by sanctions, which have killed millions, mostly children, he
has now completed his contract and is about to be fired.

This doesn't mean that US policy toward Iraq today is
entirely rational. The USA has not announced any coherent plan for the post-Saddam era,
but presumably the Ba'athist Party and the Kurdish Nationalists will find a
place, having shown their usefulness to international capitalism over the years.

The position of the proletariat of the Middle East is not currently a happy
one. Secularism has been gradually supplanted by Islamism, and the oil workers are
kept divided by nationality.

The `anti-war movement' in the West is largely confined to a pacifist
orientation, pleading with the rulers of the West to
be more ethical. You might as well try to reason with a hungry tiger. The leaders of
this movement will do anything to hold back a more militant and effective
opposition, calling out `no violence!' as they
collaborate with the most violent state in the history
of the world. But this state is in trouble, and knows it _ hence its constant attempts
to provoke terrorism. The current recession is like the unexpected scraping noise
which disturbed the revellers on the
Titanic _ you ain't seen nothing yet. The patriotic
fervor and exhortations to stand firm against
the mighty forces of the `axis of evil' will sound even more shallow as the US
economy heads south _ in the direction of Argentina.

Hopefully this short article will go some way toward explaining the real nature
of the relationships between the ruling classes of the USA and Iraq, and the potential
for international solidarity between workers in the west and in the east.
Frank Ophelia

Freedom Fries

Anti-terrorism as a pretext for repression

In 1974, bombs were going off in Britain regularly. The Provisional IRA (Irish
Republican Army) seemed to have the initiative. On 21st November, 21 random
pub-goers were killed, and dozens horribly injured, by bombs in two pubs in
Birmingham. The six men subsequently convicted and imprisoned for sixteen years
were easy suspects. Two hours after the explosions, they met at a station to
get the train to the boat to Ireland to attend the funeral of an IRA man. It
is easy to understand the determination of the police to get convictions, and
the almost universal acceptance of the truth of the allegations against the
six.

Nonetheless, they were innocent. The forensic evidence against them turned out
to have been forged, and their confessions were extracted by torture. It is worth
remembering this every time you read of the Brits "cracking a terrorist cell".

If the British police were under pressure to get someone after the
Birmingham bombs, how much greater must be the
pressure on the FBI today. The police and the state prosecution service have the job
of getting convictions. Their performance is measured by the number of people they
successfully prosecute, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence.

As part of the FBI's attempt to cover their red faces following their failure to
prevent the September 11th attacks, a certain Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye was
arrested at Portland airport one year later. He is
the leader of the city's largest mosque. The police initially claimed to have found
traces of an explosive in his luggage. The media repeated this story. Subsequently, it
turned out there wasn't any explosive after all. A group of his supporters demonstrated for
his release in the middle of Portland. Five of them were subsequently arrested
and charged with conspiracy to levy war against the United States, conspiracy to provide
services and material support to Al-Quaida and the Taleban, and firearms offences.

It is alleged that they travelled to western China in October 2001 with the intention
of entering Afghanistan to fight the American forces, who had just started bombing
the country. The evidence mostly consists of tape recordings made by an
undercover agent. They have been subjected to trial
by media. One of the five, Patrice Lumumba, allegedly sent anti-Semitic emails to
the mayor of Portland. The content of these emails? "Portland should break off
sister-city relations with Ashkelon, Israel,
citing that nation's treatment of
Palestinians" ('Willamette Week', October 16th,
2002). This suggestion would be regarded as a moderate proposal almost anywhere else
in the world, but equating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism is common
throughout the American media. The truth is the
opposite: supporters of Israel thrive on anti-Semitism, and there are numerous
examples of them collaborating with anti-Semites
to help their nation-building plans. A concise history can be found in Lenny Brenner's
'Zionism in the Age of the Dictators' which is available in a free online edition.

The lawyers for one of the accused, October Lewis, argue that a judge in the
case has already allowed evidence to 'spill over' from another defendant to her _ which
does not of course imply that it is admissable against any of the defendants. It
includes secretly taped conversations which have
bits missing, and activities which are not illegal, such as downloading Islamic
extremist views from the Internet, and learning
to shoot. The prosecution wants to avoid allowing the defence to cross-examine the
key prosecution witness, which might undermine some aspects of the alleged
conversations. It may be that some of the
self-incriminating statements are nothing but machismo.

As to the alleged plot, it is impossible to enter Afghanistan via western China _
the forty-mile frontier, guarded even more heavily than usual since the US attack,
consists of one of the most formidable ranges in the Himalayas. The police claim that,
after failing to get in via China, they tried to get to Pakistan, but couldn't get a visa,
so they dispersed to Malaysia, Bangladesh and Oregon. Their behavior is not quite
consistent with that of the hardened Islamist militants the prosecution alleges they are.

The Feds are thinking of trying the John Walker approach, and threatening the
five with the capital charge of treason to get a plea bargain. Walker was found fighting
with the Taleban in Afghanistan. He ended up in prison in Mazar-al-Sharif in the tender
hands of the Northern Alliance. When they and their CIA allies tried to murder the
prisoners, they rebelled, killing a CIA man in the process.

Many of them ended up dead, others in a concentration camp at Guantanamo
Bay where they are kept in cages and only allowed out for two 15-minute breaks
every week (BBC website, Jan 11 2003). There have been fifteen attempted suicides,
and whereas the State Department dismissed allegations of torture as 'ridiculous', the
Pentagon said they are being investigated (BBC website, Feb 14 2003). It is worth
reminding US officials that many countries still adhere to the Geneva Convention, and
they may be pursued in future for crimes of humanity against these prisoners of war.

John Walker was 'persuaded' to confess to planning to attack Americans as a
member of al-Quaida. If this were true, why would they risk his life on the front lines
of northern Afghanistan when he would be more useful travelling to the West with
his US passport? He was threatened with the capital charge of treason. Joining the
Afghan army before the US invasion may be dumb, but it isn't treasonous. Nevertheless,
he broke down, and accepted a plea bargain resulting in a twenty-year sentence.
Since the Portland Five are US citizens, it might be wondered why they are not being
charged with treason. It's because, under the
Constitution, proof of guilt in treason cases is a very high bar for the prosecution to
jump over, so the state has cooked up various substitutes _ conspiracy to levy war against
the US is one of them.

Arian Brother

If they can't prove anything in an ordinary court, they'll try a military one.
If that doesn't work, they'll intern the suspect without trial, though if you
are a US citizen, you may eventually get to meet a lawyer _ but not privately.
A Palestinian academic, Sami Amin al-Arian, and three others have been arrested
in Florida, charged with financing 'terrorists' fighting against Israel. Sami
is well-known for his outspoken defence of the Palestinian intifada. But he
is also an establishment figure. Sami was invited to the White House as a Muslim
leader before and after September 11th (LA Times/Wash. Post Service, Feb 22
2003). He has met president Bush and campaigned for him. He appears to be a
victim of a factional shift within the White House in favor of Israel. At 4:30
am on March 8th, 120 FBI and INS agents arrived at the University of Idaho on
military aircraft. They arrested a Saudi student, terrorizing the families who
live in the same block, and told everyone to stay indoors. Twenty other students
were interrogated. The suspect is being charged with visa fraud because he used
his computer education, obtained in the USA, to maintain websites expressing
support for the Islamic tendency in the intifada _ in other words, a thought-crime.

The definition of 'terrorism' has rapidly changed from being an emotive
substitute for the word 'murder', to damage to
property, to sending money to people fighting ethnic cleansing, and now, even to
expressing pro-Palestinian opinions.

Even the 'Economist' magazine, one of America's few remaining friends
abroad, compares the direction the administration
is going with apartheid South Africa (March 8-14 2003). It is worth distinguishing
our position from that of civil libertarians. More important than the legal erosion of the
Constitution is the actual amount of repression the state can get away with. The crushing
of the Black Panthers or the Waco holocaust were not permitted by any law.
Nevertheless, passing new repressive laws does
make it easier for the FBI. We should not be diverted solely into fighting repression on
the legal front. In Seattle, June 2-6, a conference on Law Enforcement will be
addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Director of Homeland Security Tom
Ridge. Topics announced include 'criminal protest groups' and 'left wing terrorism'. They
want to put damage to corporate property in defence of the environment, or blockading
the street, in the same category as murdering innocent people. The net is widening,
but people in Seattle have put out a call to be there and protest.

The horror of September 11th should lead to opposing the US government and its
domestic and foreign policies, which have been disastrous if judged according to their
stated aims, not to supporting making them worse.
Frank Ophelia, March 13, 2003

September 11th (Chile, 1973)

In Chile, "September 11th" means the date of the military coup of
1973. This coup, backed by the American government, resulted in the deaths of
about ten times as many people as the World Trade Center massacre of 2001.

The point of this article is not to complain about the chauvinism of the media in
telling us that the lives of Americans are far
more important than those of the denizens of the developing world. It is to spell out as
simply as possible the lessons of what happened in Chile. These lessons need to be
clearly stated and learned as the world descends
into crisis and the USA into dictatorship. It's
not rocket science, yet today millions of people in South America and beyond still put
their faith in elected left-wing leaders. 1973 should have tested that faith to
destruction once and for all. By "the left" we mean
that part of the capitalist political apparatus whose specific purpose is to tie the
working class to the state.

Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, the
leftist president of Brazil, was elected in
October 2002 and promised to abolish poverty by legal means. The legalistic left have
also crawled out of the woodwork in Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina. But the
world's ruling class, its banks and death squads
don't respect the law, and anyone who goes around saying they do is spreading illusions
which work in their interests, even if they murder him.

Chile's left-wing Popular Front government of Salvador Allende was elected
in 1970. Richard Nixon's US administration, working with the major corporations
with interests in the country, particularly the
copper mining companies, did everything they could to undermine this government.
This had the effect of strengthening it _ AND THEREFORE WEAKENING
THE WORKING CLASS.

There are essentially two parties in society: the Arm The Working Class Party
and the Disarm The Working Class Party. Allende belonged to the latter.

Allende's supporters today claim that all the strikes by workers between his
election in September 1970 and his murder three years later were caused by right-wing
provocateurs. There were strikes by truck owners, supported by the CIA, who wanted
to overthrow Allende and make Chile safer for business. But there were also genuine
working-class struggles. Allende used the unions to undermine them and the police to
suppress them, like all governments do, and his supporters slandered strikers by
amalgamating their struggles with those of the right.

The chief of the military, Schneider, who was loyal to the elected government,
was murdered by a right-wing terrorist group funded by the CIA. He was replaced
by Prats, another democratic sucker, but Prats had to resign in August 1973 in the face
of insubordination by the more conservative officers. He appointed General Pinochet
to take his place, and Allende confirmed the appointment. This was not quite as dumb
as it appears in hindsight _ Pinochet kept his membership of the coup plot secret
even from the American embassy. But in any case, Allende continued to believe that the
military would obey his orders, and told the workers and shanty-town dwellers to
remain calm. So subservient to his democratic capitalist beliefs was Allende, he refused to
arm the workers to save his supporters. He said the arms were not available. This is
nonsense. In the whole of Chile, there were thousands of loyal soldiers and sailors with
access to armories. When the coup started, the generals and admirals had many of
these servicemen murdered. An attempted coup on June 29th 1973 was easily crushed
by loyal soldiers acting under Allende's orders. The Chilean armed forces consisted
mostly of conscripts, workers in uniform, prepared to stand against their right-wing
officers. Even Allende's last words included an appeal to the workers to `remain calm' and
not to resist, to avoid bloodshed.

In the workplaces, as the coup progressed, the unions tried to suppress working
class resistance. `"Since there is a remote
possibility that things may return to normal once the putsch is put down", a union leader
said, "why don't we take this opportunity to
discuss how we can expand our textile production and improve the distribution?"'
(Samuel Chavkin).

Before the military takeover, the armed forces arrested working-class militants
in possession of guns, using a gun-control law enacted by Allende. According to
his hagiographer, Chavkin,

"As it turned out, this regulation was not applied to such Fascist groups as `Patria
y Libertad' but instead was used to terrorize pro-Allende supporters". Shocking, isn't it?

In a straight military battle, armed workers cannot defeat a trained military
force one-tenth of their size. But workers do have the advantage of being able to paralyze
the economy. It is impossible to run the economy at gunpoint. Capitalism
needs unions and "workers' parties" to
undermine resistance as well as tanks.

Chile 1973 was the violent announcement of the neoliberal epoch, which is now
falling apart. The word "liberal" in
"neoliberal" refers to laissez-faire economics, the
idea that the state leaves businesses to get on
with it. In fact, the policy depended on extensive state intervention from both left and right.

Despite the disarming of the proletariat, literal and metaphorical, by the left, and
the massacres of the Pinochet regime, the Chilean working class gradually recovered,
resisted, and forced concessions from its rulers. Today, it enjoys the highest standard
of living in South America. Frank Ophelia